Tennessee Has No Law Against Police Hiding Cars From Their Own Camera Networks
As lawmakers debate license-plate camera regulation, a quiet feature of the software — the ability to exempt chosen plates from alerts — falls into a gap nobody has closed
Whitelist, Safelist
For most drivers, an automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera works the same way every time: it photographs the plate, checks it against police databases, and logs the pass. But the software behind the country’s largest ALPR network, Flock Safety, also includes a lesser-known feature that lets an agency do the opposite — mark a specific plate as “trusted” so the system stops alerting on it. In Flock’s interface this is sometimes called a Safe List, Whitelist, or Exempt Vehicle List. Whatever it’s called, the effect is the same: a real, validly registered plate goes into the database and, functionally, disappears from the alert stream.
That feature is now at the center of a small but pointed local controversy in Maryville, Tennessee — and it exposes a regulatory blind spot that stretches well beyond one East Tennessee city.
The claim out of Maryville
A local advocacy site, MaryvillePrivacy.org, says it used a Tennessee Public Records Act (TPRA) request to obtain a screenshot of Maryville’s Flock “Safe List.” According to the site, the list contained three plates — 5963, 635BGDX, and BDY2035 (Internet sleuths… Watch the watcher – Do your thing – who are these plates registered to?)— each set to never expire. The site says the Maryville Police Department confirmed in writing that none of the three belonged to police or city-owned vehicles, and that in a follow-up response dated December 12, 2025, Police Chief Tony Crisp stated the department has no written policy governing plate suppression and that Lieutenant Rod Fernandez approved putting the plates on the list.
It’s worth being direct about the sourcing here: every detail of that account currently traces back to one advocacy organization, not to an independent newsroom. Outlets that have covered Maryville-area Flock controversies this year — including WVLT, WBIR, WATE, and the Daily Times — have reported on a camera-shooting arrest, a proposed regional drone program, and the broader statewide debate, but a search did not turn up independent confirmation of the whitelist claim specifically. That doesn’t make it false; TPRA responses are exactly the kind of primary-source record a second requester could confirm or contest by asking the City Recorder for the same file. It does mean the claim should currently be read as one group’s presentation of records it says it obtained, not as an established, multiply-sourced fact. It’s also relevant context that the same site has been separately tracking Chief Crisp’s campaign for a Tennessee House seat and a surveillance vendor’s contributions to it — background that doesn’t invalidate the records claim but is part of the full picture.
What does FLOCK SAFETY and AXON say about safelist-whitelist
Flock Safety officially markets a “SafeList” as a privacy tool. Axon has no equivalently branded “whitelist” feature in its marketing, which centers entirely on “hotlists” (inclusion lists that trigger alerts); however, Axon’s own admin support documentation for Axon Evidence describes a back-end toggle that moves a specific vehicle from a “Vehicles Alerted” list to a “Vehicles Not Alerted” list within a hotlist — functionally similar to a suppression list.
A pattern with almost no independent documentation, nationally
Zooming out, “whitelisting” specific plates is functionally the mirror image of the far better-documented “hotlist” — the list of stolen, wanted, or flagged plates that trigger alerts, which privacy researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Brennan Center for Justice have written about extensively. Suppression lists get comparatively little scrutiny. A search of national reporting on Flock and ALPR abuse turned up plenty of documented problems — officers using the system to track romantic partners in Milwaukee, a Pasadena sergeant investigated for using it to monitor a fellow officer, Georgia officers fired for out-of-scope searches, and reporting by 404 Media on federal immigration agencies accessing local ALPR data — but nothing comparable to Maryville’s specific claim of a formal exemption list for private vehicles. Whether that’s because the practice is rare, because it draws less attention than misuse cases, or simply because few requesters have thought to ask for it, is an open question. It’s a thinner-documented corner of a well-documented technology.
Tennessee’s law covers retention. It doesn’t cover this.
Tennessee does have a statute specific to license plate readers: Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-10-302. It caps how long captured plate data can be stored — 90 days, longer if tied to an active investigation, with destruction required once that investigation closes or results in no charges. A separate provision, § 10-7-504(a)(32), was added to shield captured plate data from public inspection under the state’s records law — though as published in the current code, that confidentiality provision carries its own sunset clause, listed as repealed effective July 1, 2026. Whether the legislature renewed or replaced it before that date wasn’t confirmed in this reporting and is worth a records request of its own.
What neither statute does is address whitelisting, suppression lists, or exemptions at all. Tennessee’s ALPR law doesn’t require agencies to adopt a written use policy before switching a system on, doesn’t mandate audits of who can add or remove a plate from any list, and doesn’t ban an agency from marking a private citizen’s car as exempt from alerts. That puts Tennessee well behind a number of states that have moved on this. California’s S.B. 34 and S.B. 210 require a published privacy and use policy before an ALPR system goes live, mandate annual audits, and direct the state attorney general to draft a model policy. North Carolina law requires a written policy addressing supervisory oversight before deployment. Montana’s ALPR statute requires the same, with criminal penalties for violations. Washington’s S.B. 6002, effective this March, adds new restrictions on ALPR access and makes evidence gathered in violation of the law inadmissible in court. Oklahoma has a similar bill pending. None of these specifically legislate the whitelist scenario either — but each requires the kind of written, publicly available policy that would at least put a decision like Maryville’s on the record before the fact, rather than only surfacing it after a records request.
Tennessee lawmakers appear to be catching up to the conversation, if not yet to the specific issue. This summer, after Knox County’s sheriff’s office came close to installing roughly 300 additional cameras, the Knox County Commission voted to demand more information about the county’s existing system, and Knoxville’s police chief, Paul Noel, issued a public statement defending the department’s safeguards. State representatives have been publicly split — one, Rep. Gino Zachary, said flatly that expanding the camera network risks building “a surveillance state,” while others, including Rep. Sam McKenzie, have pointed to the technology’s use in catching people who flee to rural counties. At the federal level, Rep. Tim Burchett has introduced legislation that would block federal dollars from being used to buy ALPR systems, and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs has warned the cameras risk “inadvertently creating a warrantless mass surveillance system.” Multiple outlets reported in late July that state and federal lawmakers are planning to take the issue up again when the legislature reconvenes in January 2027. Whitelisting hasn’t yet been named publicly as part of that agenda — but nothing currently proposed appears to address it directly.
Two different “ghost” problems — worth not confusing
It’s worth separating this from a different, unrelated practice that also gets called by “ghost” names in the news: fraudulent paper temporary tags and electronic plate-flipping devices, sometimes called “ghost plates” or “ghost cars,” which criminals use to defeat toll cameras and evade identification after hit-and-runs and other crimes. That is unambiguously illegal. Tennessee law bars tinted or camera-blocking plate covers outright under § 55-4-110, and Tennessee is among the states that have moved to restrict plate-flipper devices specifically. A validly registered plate that a police department has manually exempted from its own alert system is a different animal entirely — the plate itself is genuine and legal; what’s being suppressed is the software’s response to it.
Where that leaves the legal question
Nothing in current Tennessee law makes an agency’s whitelist practice illegal. It’s not addressed by the retention statute, not covered by the (possibly lapsed) confidentiality provision, and not touched by any written-policy requirement, because Tennessee has none. That’s a genuine gap, not a violation — which is itself the substance of what Maryville’s critics are arguing: that an agency can quietly create a two-tier system with no rule stopping it and no audit trail requiring it to explain why.
Whether that gap rises to a constitutional problem — unequal treatment among similarly situated drivers, or a transparency failure under the state’s public records act — is a separate and harder legal question that a single TPRA response can’t settle on its own. It would likely require litigation, a formal complaint, or new legislation to resolve. The broader constitutional fight over ALPR networks generally is already playing out in federal court: in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, two Virginia residents are challenging a 175-camera Flock network as an unconstitutional warrantless search, backed by amicus briefs from the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after a district court ruled for the city in January 2026. The case is now before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Chatrie v. United States on geofence location data has already reshaped arguments on both sides. Tennessee sits in the Sixth Circuit, not the Fourth, so a Fourth Circuit ruling in Schmidt wouldn’t bind Tennessee courts directly — but a decision either way is expected to influence how every state, including Tennessee, eventually writes its ALPR rules.
For now, in Tennessee, the rule is that there is no rule.